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XML Formatter

Turn a wall of unreadable XML into a properly indented tree you can actually navigate — or minify it back down.

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How it works

A compact workflow from input to download.

1

Paste your XML

Drop in a config file, an API response, an RSS feed, a sitemap or a SOAP envelope.

2

Format or minify

Add clean indentation to reveal the structure, or strip whitespace for transmission.

3

Copy the result

Copy the formatted XML out, ready to read or ship.

Frequently asked questions

Does formatting change what the XML means?
For most documents, no. But be aware that XML technically treats whitespace inside elements as significant unless a schema says otherwise, so in principle reformatting can alter mixed content. For configuration files, feeds and data documents — which is nearly everything people format — it is entirely safe.
Will it tell me if my XML is malformed?
Yes. Unclosed tags, mismatched tag names and invalid characters are reported, since the document has to be parsed before it can be reformatted. XML is famously unforgiving compared with HTML — a single unclosed tag makes the whole document invalid rather than merely untidy.
Is XML still relevant?
Very much so, even though JSON has displaced it for new web APIs. XML remains entrenched in enterprise systems, SOAP services, RSS and Atom feeds, XML sitemaps, SVG, Office document formats, Android layouts and Maven builds. It is not the fashionable choice, but there is an enormous amount of it in production.
Is my data sent to a server?
No. Everything runs in JavaScript inside your own browser tab — nothing is uploaded, logged or stored. That is what makes it safe to paste in API responses, config files, tokens and other material you could not send to a third-party service.

What XML does that JSON does not

It is easy to dismiss XML as a verbose relic, but that misses what it was built for. XML has attributes as well as elements, letting you distinguish an object's metadata from its content. It has namespaces, which allow two vocabularies to be mixed in one document without their tag names colliding — indispensable when documents are assembled from multiple standards. It has genuinely mature schema languages in DTD and XSD that can validate a document's structure automatically before you process it. It has XPath and XSLT for querying and transforming documents declaratively. JSON has none of this natively. For a public web API, that machinery is overkill and JSON's simplicity wins easily. For a regulated industry exchanging complex documents between organisations that must agree precisely on structure, the ceremony is the point.

Reading deeply nested documents

The practical reason to format XML is that the structure is the meaning, and minified XML hides the structure completely. A SOAP envelope or a configuration file arriving as a single 4,000-character line is not merely unpleasant to read — it is genuinely impossible to reason about, because you cannot see which element is nested inside which. Indentation turns that flat string back into a visible tree, and suddenly the mismatched tag, the element in the wrong parent, or the section that was silently duplicated becomes obvious. Formatting is not cosmetic here; it is the difference between debugging by inspection and debugging by guesswork.

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